Boy George made it to Broadway this fall. Stephen Sondheim probably won't. That says a lot about the state of New York theatre. The Boy George show, Taboo, was produced on the whim of one person, a rarity when the cost of mounting a musical hovers around $14 million. (Taboo was a mere $10 million.) It also fits into the trend of Broadway as a recycling bin for pop culture.

Sondheim, on the other hand, though the most revered of contemporary composers, has never been an easy sell. His new show, Bounce, which was tried out at the Kennedy Centre, in Washington, is being produced by a consortium. Even though its cost is far less than Taboo, the likelihood of its reaching New York is slim.

Taboo was produced by the talk show host Rosie O'Donnell, who began as a standup comic. She saw Taboo in London and decided to produce it in New York, investing the entire amount herself. It opened to generally sneering reviews. How long it lasts will depend upon her willingness to throw good money after bad.

Taboo follows the trend of repackaging pop culture. Starting with the Disney Studio's theatrical version of its own Beauty and the Beast in 1994, many musicals have been retreads of popular movies - from The Lion King to The Producers and Hairspray. In the past year, Broadway has turned towards pop music, though largely of a vintage that its greying audience relates to, such as the 1970s hits in Mamma Mia. Last year Billy Joel songs were used for Movin' Out, which had inventive choreography by Twyla Tharp. Taboo incorporated several of Boy George's Culture Club hits as well as less fetching new material.

A few weeks earlier came The Boy From Oz, a musical biography of Peter Allen, using his own songs. Martin Sherman, who wrote the book, was unable to avoid Hollywood bio-pic cliches, probably inevitable when you have Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli as characters. What raised Boy From Oz above its material was Hugh Jackman, whose charisma far outshone Allen's.

Jackman was supposed to make his New York debut four years ago, in Trevor Nunn's production of Oklahoma! but he was not yet a movie star, so Actors' Equity refused to allow him or any of the other Brits to do it. That was a pity because the American cast of 2002 did not really do Nunn's vision full justice.

The other big musical this fall was Wicked, based on Gregory Maguire's popular novel about Oz before Dorothy's arrival. Wicked, which had a disappointing score by Stephen Schwartz, attempts political allegory, but succeeds only feebly. Comic performances by Carole Shelley and Kristen Chenoweth (who brings to the stage many of the charms of Reese Witherspoon) did not compensate for the over-gestated material.

The most solid of the nonmusical works this season was William Nicholson's The Retreat From Moscow starring Eileen Atkins. Several plays tried to deal with 9/11, but none did cogently. One, Omnium Gatherum, involved a dinner party with characters based on Martha Stewart, Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens. The ending clarified what the audience understood instinctively - the party was taking place in hell.

This week we have the opening of a new musical by Tony Kushner, a semi-autobiographical tale of the relationship between a young Jewish boy and his African American maid, set in 1963. Expectations are high, but I found it listless.

For the first time, this year's Pulitzer Prize was awarded on the basis of reading rather than seeing the play. You can see why the judges were attracted to the premise of Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics. It was the custom in cigar factories in Florida before the Depression for a lector read to the workers. Here the handsome new lector reads Anna Karenina . The play examines the effects of Tolstoy on the Caribbean immigrants. Jimmy Smits (of NYPD Blue) played the lector, which accounted for its appearance on Broadway. The production did not capture the intermittent poetry of the material.

Similarly, The Violet Hour, by Richard Greenberg (the author of Take Me Out, which was a hit at the Donmar last year), which was about the New York literary world in 1919, was mounted in a production that seemed unfinished, except for Robert Sean Leonard as a wealthy neophyte publisher.

Broadway used to be censured for the slickness of its productions. That no longer applies. Broadway no longer has its own stars, so it is always eager to import them from Hollywood. It doesn't always work because many Hollywood stars, unlike Leonard, have never had stage training. Anthony Page's production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Ashley Judd and Jason Patric, was not very compelling, though Ned Beatty scored a triumph as Big Daddy. Kevin Kline has done stage work, so it is not surprising he is giving a brilliantly comic and touching performance as Falstaff in a marvellous Henry IV that combines both plays. And Amy Freed has written a hilarious spoof of theories of Shakespearean authorship, The Beard of Avon, which opened Off-Off Broadway.

So the fall has not been without pleasures - which has included Lisa Loomer's Living Out, a witty and moving play about Beverly Hills matrons and their Hispanic nannies. We can expect Michael Frayn's West End production of Democracy to transfer here in the spring, while Stoppard's Jumpers is rumoured to follow.

As for Bounce, which was about the Mizner brothers - Wilson, a conman and playwright, and Addison, the chief architect of Palm Beach - that was not without problems. But it had the customary Sondheim intelligence, and even a 'take-home tune'. It was first presented, under a different title, four years ago, then extensively rewritten. It opened to mixed reviews in Washington, minimising the chance that another New York subsidised theatre, let alone a commercial producer, would present it.

In his 1974 book Contradictions , Hal Prince, who directed Bounce, said he liked the way Broadway always treated him as if he were a newcomer who had to prove himself. I wonder if he still feels that way.